Patient safety

Patient safety is a discipline focused on improving health care through the prevention, reduction, reporting and analysis of error and other types of unnecessary harm that often lead to adverse patient events. People did not recognize the magnitude of avoidable adverse events until the 1990s, when several countries reported alarming numbers of patients harmed and killed by medical errors.^[1] After recognizing that healthcare errors impact 1 in every 10 patients around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) called patient safety an endemic concern.^[2]

As a result, patient safety has emerged as a distinct healthcare discipline, supported by an immature, yet developing, scientific framework. There is a significant transdisciplinary body of theoretical and research literature that informs the science of patient safety^[3] with mobile health apps becoming an increasingly important area of research.^[4]